We’ve already discussed out of conference records and bowl games and really we haven’t seen one conference start to break away from the pack to take the lead. What we have seen are two of the conferences begin to trail. The Big East and the Pac-10 have started to fall behind the other conferences. Perhaps these two can catch up in the standings as we look through different criteria to judge. The next category to discuss is polls.

There are many, many polls out there and if we were to look at all of them I believe this study will become less valid. When it comes down to it, there have been two polls most college football fans have paid attention to over the past couple decades. The AP Poll, though no longer factored in to the BCS Standings, still continues to be a poll that most fans, coaches, and players consider to be the most valid poll of them all. The Coaches Poll, whatever name it goes by (ESPN, USA Today, CNNSI, etc.) does factor in to the BCS Standings and has been considered a legitimate poll for a long time now.

Some may argue that we should look at BCS Standings themselves or use some of the computer generated polls or the Harris Poll that all factor into these standings. This would be a valid argument I suppose, but to that I say: write your own article. When National Champions are crowned every year, it’s really these two polls that dictate who is deemed champion. When there have been co-national champs in the past, it’s because these two polls deemed different teams as champion. No one has a banner at their school that says “2005 Harris Poll Champion” or 2005 “New York Times Poll Champion”.

You’ll see from the following table that this category clearly shows a winner. I can’t really add too much subjectivity to this. Of the three categories we’ve discussed so far, this is the most subjective: polls in of themselves are subjective. I don’t really need to add my own here. Keep in mind the numbers you see in this table are the number of times the conference shows up in the poll. The top table shows the top 25 and the bottom table shows the top 10.

Overall, the SEC doesn’t only show up more frequently than the other conferences, it shows up 25% more frequently than the second place conference in the AP and 29% more frequently than the second place conference in the Coaches. There’s no better word to describe this category than domination. Seven of the SEC’s twelve teams appeared in both polls so this shows that the strength of the conference is spread fairly evenly rather than being dominated by one or two strong teams.

Does the SEC’s success come from a lot of teams getting consistently ranked #23 in the polls? No it doesn’t – take a look at the top ten spots in the polls. The SEC appears 41% more frequently in the top 10 than the second place conference in the AP and 35% more frequently than the second place conference in the Coaches. Six of the seven ranked SEC teams throughout the season spent time in the top 10 of both polls. This statistic is mighty impressive.

Overall, the race for second in this category is close between the ACC and the Big Ten. The ACC squeaks it out by three occurrences in each poll. Like the SEC, the ACC has seven teams out of twelve that show up in the polls throughout the year. The ACC cements second place by the fact that they have 47% more frequency in the top ten of the AP and 45% more frequency in the top ten of the Coaches than the Big Ten.

The race for third comes down to the Big Ten and the Pac-10. The Big Ten has a wide margin of top 25 appearances; they show up in the AP 22% more frequently and in the Coaches 29% more frequently than the Pac-10. The Pac-10 shows up slightly more in the AP top 10 than the Big Ten and exactly the same number of times in the Coaches top 10. The Big Ten has an impressive nine of its eleven teams appearing in both polls throughout the year. Of these, four appeared in the top 10. The Big Ten easily takes third place in this category.

The Pac-10 is our fourth place finisher. The conference appears much more frequently in the AP Poll than the Big XII – 32% and there is about the same margin in the Coaches – 33%. The Pac-10 also has 33% more appearances in the top 10 of both polls. You may think this is all about USC, but Texas appeared in the top 10 just as frequently as USC so those two teams are a wash.  This boils down to teams like Oregon, UCLA and Arizona State appearing in the polls more often than teams in the Big XII outside of Texas.

As disappointing as the poll performance was in 2005 for the Big XII, the conference still easily defeats the Big East. The Big XII appears 83% more often in the AP poll and 68% more often in the Coaches than the Big East. Obviously, Texas’ permanent spot in the top two in both polls helps here. Take away Texas, and the Big XII only appeared in the AP poll 28 times and 26 times in the Coaches’ poll all year! Keeping Texas out of the discussion again and the conference only appeared in the top ten of both polls twice all year! This was Oklahoma’s brief stay in the preseason poll and Texas Tech cracked the top ten of both polls in week 8 of the season.

Once again, the Big East finishes last in another category. The conference only appears one more time in the AP poll and six more times in the Coaches’ poll than mid major conferences cumulatively. The Big East only cracked the top ten twice in the AP and three times in the Coaches’ poll all year! That’s less than Notre Dame by itself....a LOT less! This is another category where the Big East not only loses, but really gets killed.

It should be noted that the conferences do have different sizes. In other words, the Pac-10 is at a disadvantage to the Big Ten because it has one less team. Looking at the wide margin in our table above, prorating this fact into the equation would not likely change the order of finish in this category. It may narrow the gap between the Big XII and the Big East and widen the gap between the Pac-10 and the Big XII, but it wouldn’t make one conference finish differently in the order.

So, after factoring in polls, let’s see what our standings look like:

Overall                         Out of conference                     Bowl games                  Polls

1. SEC                                     2                                              3                         1

2. ACC                                    1                                              4                         2

3. Big Ten                                3                                              2                         3

4. Big XII                                 4                                              1                         5

5. Pac-10                                 5                                              5                         4

6. Big East                                6                                              6                         6

Stay tuned for the next article where I’ll discuss the NFL Draft results.